Articles

It’s important that test authors keep in mind the inherent authority their tests possess. After all, an application’s tests are sometimes the first lines of code a new developer will read when acclimating to a new codebase. Tests aren't the only kind of documentation you need, but automated tests in a CI environment can provide a lot of useful information.

Part of the path to DevOps requires adoption of agile methodologies. What does it mean for testing when you switch from the traditional waterfall model, with a few long release cycles per year, to the agile model, with changes occurring every two weeks? Here are five key factors to achieve the agile software testing necessary in DevOps.

DevOps is more than adopting the right set of tools; it's a cultural shift that incorporates testing at each stage of the agile project lifecycle. Continuous testing is key to unlocking this culture change because it weaves testing activities into every part of the software design, development, and deployment processes, which helps everyone involved communicate more, collaborate better, and innovate faster.

Many teams have existing automated test suites that are not included in a continuous integration program. Maybe the tests take too long to execute, or they are not reliable enough to give accurate results. Here’s how to assess your test suites in terms of value added and time to execute, along with five proven strategies to optimize those suites for CI.

Migrating an organization to continuous integration requires adoption new processes, tools, and automation. DevOps relies on dramatic culture change to encourage total transparency and collaboration among all project stakeholders.

Interviews

In this interview, Anj Dubey, director of performance engineering for McGraw-Hill Education, discusses the need to shift left and embed your performance engineering into your CI/CD pipeline in order to ensure that every line of code is going to meet your performance requirements.

In this interview, Melissa Benua, a senior technical lead at mParticle, explains how traditional testers can use their current skill sets to easily transition to new concepts, like DevOps. She also details how continuous testing and continuous integration continue to be major hot topics.

In this interview, Jennifer Scandariato, the director of test engineering and leader of the Women in Technology initiative at iCIMS, explains the changing role of the manual tester, how they can adapt to a much faster environment, and why security is more important than ever before.

In this interview, Jennifer Scandariato, the director of test engineering and leader of the Women in Technology initiative at iCIMS, explains how you can alter the way you develop your software to avoid creating defects—through culture, continuous integration, and automation.

Conference Presentations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making it possible for computers to diagnose some medical diseases more accurately than doctors. Such systems analyze millions of patient records, recognize underlying data patterns, and generalize them for diagnosing previously unseen patients. A key challenge is determining whether a patient's symptoms and history are attributed to a known disease or other factors. Software testers face a similar problem when triaging automation failures. They investigate questions like, Is the failure due to a defect, environmental issue, or nondeterministic test script? Is there current or historical evidence to support one belief over another? Join Tariq King as he describes how test failures and flakiness can be modeled for machine learning (ML) as causal disease-symptom relations.

Performance issues substantially impact quality, cost, and customer confidence. Agile teams are challenged to build in performance processes throughout the lifecycle, but it is critical to incorporate performance into your CI/CD pipeline. Join Amit Patel as he shares his recent project experiences and the steps his team took to change processes, leverage different technologies, and align internal stakeholders. He explains how they use production-monitoring solutions to create a real-world production feedback loop in order to ensure they can analyze data and turn the information into actionable defects. As part of this, his team created process and procedures to execute performance tests on a regular basis and pass/fail builds based on thresholds. Join Amit to learn how to build a successful production feedback loop, align internal stakeholders, and implement holistic performance engineering.

Modern software development has brought us an incredibly powerful tool: continuous integration and deployment. However, taking advantage of this new system isn’t always straightforward. With powerful new tools come powerful new ways of making mistakes that can take your product down in a heartbeat. Melissa Benua has years of experience making CI and CD work for her, with lots of insights—both good and not so good. Come and learn from her as she shares key tips and tricks for coding and testing for both forward and backward compatibility in software releases. Useful for both traditional testers as well as combined engineers, Melissa provides technical and actionable advice to enable your team to make the right trade-offs and the right time investments, allowing your product to release to your customers safely and successfully.

Peer-to-peer Discussion: How Do I Make CD Work in My Environment? Building a successful continuous delivery pipeline is very context specific. Large organizations with legacy code, existing physical environments, regulatory constraints, large monolithic applications, or stove piped organizations often struggle to find a continuous delivery approach that will work for them successfully. If this sounds familiar, this session is for you. Join facilitator Lee Eason as conference participant’s work together to identify and solve difficult continuous delivery challenges. Learn how other participants and speakers have dealt with the issues you have within their own companies and how you can apply their lessons learned. Share your successes and help others solve their DevOps problems. Expand upon questions you’ve asked during others sessions so you leave the conference with even more ideas for addressing your CD challenges.

Women Who Test connects women software professionals around the world – allowing them to share testing ideas and solutions while helping each other thrive and advance their careers.

The community is an ever-expanding group of engaged, and encouraging women who are stepping up to start meet-ups and create local chapters. Explore the existing local chapters and consider sharing and joining! WomenWhoTest.com